Abstract

This article contributes to our understanding of financial power in Canada by highlighting the ways in which the Canadian chartered banks may have used philanthropy strategically to diffuse public hostility to their power. Taking an historical perspective, it is argued that it was in the 1990s that an important transformation took place in the Canadian banking sector: bank philanthropy not only accelerated, but also became more populist, and showed signs of being reactive to negative public attitudes about the concentration of financial power in Canada. To theorize these phenomena, the Gramscian notion of 'hegemony' is invoked to help explain the banking sectors’ collective behaviour.